What is one of the advantages of the amazon relational database service (amazon rds)?

Advantages of switching to AWS RDS

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a managed database service that allows end users to setup and operate relational databases in the cloud.  RDS offers a great number of useful out-of-the-box services for scaling, backup, restoration, monitoring, high availability, and data recovery so that all you have to worry about is your application and business development.

At the same time, the database service is very cost effective, with its pay-as-you-go cost model enabling you to focus on operational expenses rather than acquiring capital expenditure.

Amazon RDS is designed for developers or businesses who require the full features and capabilities of a relational database, or who wish to migrate existing applications and tools that utilize a relational database. There are definite advantages for database developers if they use the Amazon RDS instead of managing their own relational database, and here are some of the most important ones:

• It gives you access to the capabilities of MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, or Amazon Aurora. Aurora is a MySQL-compatible database designed for scaling database applications without specialized tuning skills being needed
• Developers familiar with data modeling do not have to be proficient in administrative tasks, such as managing tablespaces and distributing table and index data
• There is no need to keep up with vendor security and performance patches. RDS also includes backup and recovery services
• Developers can take advantage of existing commercial licenses. For example, if you already have an Oracle license for an on-premises database, you can use the “bring your own license” option, which will save on hourly charges
• RDS also manages replication. If developers need high availability in a database, the multi-availability zone option can be used. With that option, a replica database is kept in sync with the primary database in case of failure
• AWS offers high availability and a hot failover option in another geographic location, so if the master database instance goes down, it will automatically fail to the secondary location.
• Simple API calls or manual changes with the AWS Management Console are all that is needed to scale a database service up or down as the load dictates.  Storage scales up to 3TB and IOPS to up to 30,000 per instance.
• Database instances can be managed from the AWS console. When you run your own instances, you will manage them using database-specific tools.

Overall, I believe Amazon RDS reduces or eliminates many of the database administration tasks that developers face when they run their own database instances.  The on demand high scalability is also very attractive. What’s your input on RDS? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Photo Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/6759981763/

As the world’s most popular open-source database, MySQL has been around the block more than a few times. Traditionally installed in on-premise data centers, recent years have shown a major trend for MySQL in the cloud, and near the top of this list is Amazon RDS.

Amazon RDS allows you to deploy scalable MySQL servers within minutes in a cost-efficient manner with easily resizable hardware capacity. This frees you up to focus on application development and leaves many of the traditional database administration tasks such as backups, patching, and monitoring in the hands of AWS.

In this post I’d like to go over six important benefits of Amazon RDS, and why a move into RDS may be the right move for you.

Download our eBook, “Enterprise Guide to Cloud Databases” to help you make more informed decisions and avoid costly mistakes as you develop and execute your cloud strategy.

Download Now

Easy Deployment

Amazon RDS allows you to use either the AWS Management Console or a set of APIs to create, delete, and modify your database instances. You have full control of access and security for your instances, as well as an easy process to manage your database backups and snapshots.

Amazon RDS for MySQL instances are pre-configured with parameters and settings tuned for the instance type you have chosen. Fear not, however, as you have a massive amount of control over these parameters with easy to manage database parameter groups that provide granular control and tuning options for your database instances.

Fast Storage Options

Amazon RDS provides two SSD-backed storage options for your database instances. The General Purpose storage option provides cost-effective storage for smaller or medium-sized workloads. For those applications that demand higher performance (such as heavy OLTP workloads), Provisioned IOPS Storage delivers consistent storage performance of up to 40,000 I/O’s per second.

Easily expandable as your storage requirements grow, you can provision additional storage on the fly with no downtime.

Backup & Recovery

A good DBA is only as good as their last backup. This is a saying I’ve heard ever since I started working with MySQL back in the 3.2.3 days. It was true then, and it is true now – without the data, what can even the best DBA do to restore production services?

With Amazon RDS, the automated backup features enable backup and recovery of your MySQL database instances to any point in time within your specified retention periods (up to 35 days). You can also manually initiate backups of your instances, and all of these backups will be stored by Amazon RDS until you explicitly delete them. Backups have never been so easy.

High Availability

On-premise high availability is often a challenge, as so many pieces of the puzzle need to work together in unison, and this is discounting the need for multiple data centers that are geographically separated.

Using Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments, you can achieve enhanced availability and durability for your MySQL database instances, making them a great fit for production database workloads. By using Amazon RDS Read Replicas, it is easy to elastically scale out beyond the capacity constraints of a single database instance for read-heavy workloads.

Monitoring/Metrics

With the available RDS monitoring features in Amazon Cloudwatch, all of the metrics for your RDS database instances are available at no additional charge. Should you want more detailed and in-depth monitoring options, CloudWatch Enhanced Monitoring provides access to over 50 CPU, memory, file system, and disk I/O metrics.

You can view key operational metrics directly within the AWS Management Console, including compute, memory, storage capacity utilization, I/O activity, instance connections, and more. Never be caught off guard again by not knowing what is happening within your database stack.

Security

As a managed service, Amazon RDS provides a high level of security for your MySQL databases. These include network isolation using Amazon VPC (virtual private cloud), encryption at rest using keys that you create and control through the AWS Key Management Service (KMS). Data can also be encrypted through the wire in transit using SSL.

This is a good point to mention the Shared Responsibility Model, as there are still components you’ll need to secure during your RDS setup.

As you can see from the AWS documentation, you are still in control of your instances, and as such will need to be sure that the settings align with your desired security best practices. While a detailed dive into the Shared Responsibility Model is beyond the scope of this article, my colleague Michael Benshoof has written a detailed overview here: The Shared Responsibility Model of Security in the Cloud.

Summary

In closing, there are many benefits to leveraging the cloud for your database infrastructure, and Amazon RDS is one of the more popular options suitable for many workloads and users. While AWS RDS does remove much of the DBA overhead with traditional on-premise installations, the customer is still responsible for managing the data itself, along with the tasks that accompany that. Analyzing workloads, performance trends, traffic management, etc., is still going to be critical even when leveraging managed cloud services. Percona can assist with your RDS deployment by picking up where AWS leaves off:

• Performance Tuning
• Capacity Planning
• Disaster Recovery
• Resource Allocation

With Percona supporting your RDS installation, you can focus your efforts on your application and business, while letting Amazon and Percona support your infrastructure. If you are researching a move into the cloud, Percona can help review your options and assist in helping you choose a solution that will be best suited for your business.

---

Want to learn more?

Read more of our blog series:

Embrace the Cloud with Microsoft Azure

Benefit from Ongoing Innovation with Google Cloud

Need help with your cloud migration? Contact us today.

What is one of the advantages of the Amazon RDS?

What is one of the advantages of the Amazon Relational Database Service Amazon RDS )? Choose two?

What are the advantages of using Amazon RDS instead of setting up MySQL database on an EC2 instance?

What are the benefits of using AWS RDS over hosting a database on an EC2 instance group of answer choices?